1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a storage medium for determining a providing method of a recording agent for printing an image based image data which has been compressed in a lossy compression method.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printing apparatus that performs printing of images may perform printing of an image based on image data which has been compressed in a lossy-compression method. A Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) method is an example of such a lossy-compression method. Image data compressed in this JPEG method is expanded, and an image based on the expanded image data is printed on a recording medium by a printing apparatus.
As described above, the JPEG method is a lossy compression method. Therefore, image degradation called mosquito noise may occur in an expanded image. This mosquito noise arises from quantization processing in JPEG compression. In the JPEG method, by quantization processing for an image which has been converted into a spatial frequency by discrete cosine transform (DCT) processing, in particular, information of high-frequency components is eliminated. Accordingly, when expansion processing is performed, for example, a signal value which does not originally exist around edges within the expanded image may be generated as the above-mentioned mosquito noise.
In Japanese Patent No. 4053460, high contrast gradation processing is performed for image data obtained by decompressing an image which has been compressed in a JPEG format. In the processing, block distortion is suppressed, and processed image data with high image quality is obtained.
In Japanese Patent No. 4053460, processing for eliminating mosquito noise against image data obtained by expanding compressed image data, is suggested. More specifically, image data obtained by expanding compressed image data is divided into units of blocks, noise determination processing is performed, and the type of noise and the degree of occurrence of noise are determined. Then, switching parameters (a quantization threshold value, an error determination threshold value, and a diffusion factor) in half tone processing for creating printing data, based on the noise determination result, is described in Japanese Patent No. 4053460.
In Japanese Patent No. 4053460, a determination is made based on an image that has been subjected to expansion processing. Therefore, it may be impossible to distinguish whether a portion determined to be noise is generated by lossy compression and expansion or is included in the original image before compression and expansion. As a result, for example, even if the degree of compression in the lossy compression method is small and noise is less likely to occur, a portion included in the original image may be falsely determined to be noise and the portion may be eliminated from the image.